My Transition from “TRA” to “TERF”

 

Disclaimer: I used the term TERF in the title strictly to make a catchier headline. I no longer refer to women as TERFs except possibly in a sense of camaraderie. I have been called a TERF repeatedly, and know it to be a slur, as unfairly and inaccurately hurled at women as it is at me.

 

For the first few years of my transition, I held and repeated many to the same viewpoints of Trans Rights Activists. This included but was not limited to: Trans women are women, as a woman I’m entitled to use women’s spaces, trans women belong in women’s sports. I even believed that there were trans children and that they should be allowed to transition. Over time my views started to shift. I became more critical of these ideas and what I was being told by other trans people. My views shifted so much that I honestly forgot that I’d ever believed the original ones.

Birth of a TRA

They say that most people don’t know any transgender people. That holds true even if you are transgender yourself, at least initially. When you first decide to transition, you go looking for resources. This may lead you to websites, Facebook groups, maybe an actual support group or LGBT center, and hopefully to a therapist. Most of those people and spaces are going to repeat the same things. Eventually even if you don’t believe them initially, you start to think that they are right, and you are wrong. After all, YOU’RE the only one disagreeing. YOU’RE the one that doesn’t agree with all these professionals and people with so much more knowledge and experience.

Another factor is that even within a group, we tend to find people we feel are similar to ourselves. It makes it easy to think things like “I’m not like the transwomen people are worried about, and neither are the other transwomen I know, so THEY must be wrong.” We dismiss the existence of people we don’t think are like us. They either don’t exist or are an extreme outlier. We may even fail to see ourselves accurately.

 I found myself going online and posting in opposition to “anti-trans” articles. Thing was, that in my view, most of the people leaving comments were also “anti-trans”. They called me a man, said I was delusional, a fetishist, and a danger to women. Since I knew that wasn’t true about myself or the other trans people I associated with, it was easy for me to write off anything else they said.

 

The Slow Shift

I’d anxiously waited out the result of a Bathroom Bill. It was defeated. Then word came about a bill in another state. This one wasn’t requiring that transgender people use the space intended for our sex, but it would make it illegal to expose opposite sex genitalia in a single-sex space. I thought this sounded very reasonable. One of the concerns that women had was about being exposed to male genitals. Weren’t we always saying that no transgender woman would ever expose her male genitals? This sounded like a great solution. Give women peace of mind and recourse if this happened, and since no transgender woman would do it anyway, no one is losing anything, right? When I expressed support for this bill, I was told that I was wrong and that this bill was very transphobic. I still don’t understand why.

I started to notice a shift when I was in trans spaces. I would get a bit of a bristle when I referred to myself as a transsexual. While people didn’t come right out and attack my views, I realized that they would simply sit quietly and not engage. I’d become the “doddering old Aunt”, embarrassing but harmless just ignore her.

Feeling I couldn’t speak my mind, I went looking for other places to talk about these issues. I found Twitter. On my first day, I was blocked by another transwoman for telling her that despite her claims, transwomen cannot have periods or even PMS as those are specific results of having a female reproductive system, which transwomen do not have. My next block came from a celebrity transwoman that claimed that because she was female and had a penis, that her penis was a female body part and therefore acceptable in female spaces.

More and more I found myself being called transphobic by other trans people and at the same time found myself agreeing with the women I was told hated me. I would read what these women thought, and it made sense, a lot more sense than males having periods or female penises.

Another Transition

As I started listening to these women, I noticed that a lot of them were listening to me too. Most were not calling me delusional or perverted or even a man. In fact, I usually only get called a man by other trans people that dislike the fact that I don’t believe in “gender identity”. I realized that while there were some things that we disagreed with, I actually had a lot in common with these women. I started reading articles they posted, and not just to come up with a counterargument. I started to understand that it wasn’t the fact that I was a transwoman that they disliked, but the impact that the current discussion on “trans rights” was having on women.

I saw women being called transphobic for stating the simple fact that there are differences between males and females and therefore differences between women and transwomen. At the same time I was called transphobic for stating a difference between someone that goes through medical transition and someone that simply announces a new gender and pronouns. I saw women being called transphobic for wanting to acknowledge the reality of being female, while the same happened to me for wanting to acknowledge the reality of medical transition.

Probably most importantly though is that I started to see that all trans people were not like me or the handful that I chose to associate with. While maybe I wouldn’t threaten a woman, there were plenty of transwomen that had no problem making violent and/or sexual threats to them. While I wouldn’t have exposed my penis in a women’s locker room, there are transwomen that said they would have no problem doing so. Also important was realizing that there was no way for women to know that I or any transwoman isn’t problematic.

Once the veil has been lifted, it can never fully return. I can now go back and think more critically about myself and my experiences with other trans people. I can see my problematic behavior and thinking. I can see the problematic behavior of other trans people that I was blind to before.

I believe that most of us share more in common than we initially think. I believe that there is common ground here somewhere, but we will never find it if we can’t have real discussions. Those discussions need to happen. They will be uncomfortable. There will be things that one or both sides don’t want to hear or accept. No one is “winning” if things continue like this.